Morning broke earlier than it should have. Golden light burned across the night sky, like tea on paper, and the stars fled from its glare, as stars are old, and they do not love a new day, for tomorrow never comes, but the Sun was arrogant, and ignored everything. The cheerful clouds raced each other to the line at the end of the endless horizon, and stars fled faster. The moon, ashamed, hid her face, but knew she would return again.

But that was on the other side of the world.

On the side of darkness, and night, and dread moonlight, a man lay kneeling in his fortress of black brick and doomed stone. His form was cloaked in a black fluid viscous beyond comprehension. To the rest of the world, the morning air smelled of determination, courage, and an honest day's work.

In this part of the world, tomorrow did not matter; neither did day. In this part of the world, night was eternal - in the sky, and in the heart of the kneeling man who held a piece of chalk in his hands. The dead moonlight filtered through a thin, eroded window, and grossly illuminated a small room with a flat ceiling, flanked by four walls and a doorway. The walls contained innumerable specks of calcium carbonate, thrown from the four hundred circles drawn on them, with circular patterns immaculate by design, perfect from memory.

The man breathed deeply the waning smell of sandalwood and chalk-dust, and continued scribbling on the floor, muttering all the possible combinations- "Fire-Sleep, Danger-Birth, Tree-Life, Death-Cold, and Obsidian - Water," and heaved a massive sigh; the day's combinations were done. He cursed himself again - what would he not have given to have a mage's memory? They did not have to try remembering such things - but life was unfortunate. The grooved stone hurt his knees. The air he breathed was cold, and mayhaps would have stung his lungs, if he had them. But his flesh and organs had melted away long ago - only his bones had tolerated the black, viscous fluid that now encompassed his entire being - the blood of Kharr'gnurc.

The blood of a god.

To Undon Mathrim, the darkness smelled of sandalwood. 

The incense was almost finished, as he drew in a shaky breath, hands folded against each other, never feeling each other. The black fluid, the blood of Kharr'gnurc, was all that had kept him anchored to this life. The shadows were stretching - day was reching even this part of the world, where lay Zruddushnakh, the impenetrable fortress of the Tyrant of the Ages. Surrounded by a dead desert on all sides, bounded by a coast, the only life that was between Undon Mathrim and the rest of the world was a village of broken ghosts and burnt houses - Sirvedra. The Tyrant had conquered the village in some unknown Age; Undon remembered it not. Every day seemed fleeting, inconsequential - he did not know when he had stopped caring. 

Yet, the stone bit into his knees. The breath of cold air hurt. His tear ducts had been melted away, yet he wanted to lay down and cry. Some promises did not demand that; some contracts did not demand that.

Like the Contract that now made him whisper the mantras of faiths long dead, just to keep them in memory; a mantra that allowed him to go on, to limp through every passing day, as he had done for eighteen hundred decades, to emerge from the chasm of responsibilty, as he had emerged from the one that had tortured him. 

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A shoemaker had rescued a drowning man. He had been betrayed. And now, it was the shoemaker who drowned, drowned in the seat of kindness, of purity, and whose very flesh was stain'd with the blood of his god. 

That drowning man knelt before the betrayer's shrine. Hopelessness, or perhaps some shard of insanity, etched into his rotting brain from so many years of loneliness, finally made him talk to the clay idol of the man he hated the most.

"You know," he whispered, looking at the statue with eyes brighter than the moon, "I am probably the only person who worships you. Is it not ironic that your only worshipper is your mortal enemy? You are dead; but I am condemned. You laugh at me from the afterlife, and I take it upon myself, and I cannot survive the mockery of being so powerful, yet so powerless. "

He stared at the statue for a long time, then shook his head; he was not thinking straight. Then again, 'twas a man's work for thinking straight - the man in Undon Mathrim had been boiled out long ago. He continued whispering to the staue of his antithesis, as it was the only thing that did not attack him.

"It has been almost six centuries since you died, Gevatar, and I still struggle on finding purpose. The Contract binds me the hardest; yet I struggle the least to break free. Tell me, O Protector of Eteagina, Last Living Forefather, why?"

He lowered his head - he imagined himself crying.

"Why...," his voice cracked, "Why me? I had done nothing. I had yearned for freedom, just like every human." Sudden rage made him look up again. "You had wished for freedom too. You had received it, and had gifted it to the world. Why couldn't I? Why could I not get my freedom, Gevatar? Why couldn't I receive my death?"

He stood up - praying and confessing could not be done with a hot mind. He pointed an accusing finger at the man who had killed a god.

"So many could have been saved if you had interfered properly, Gevatar. Instead, you only killed Kharr'gnurc, and decided that humanity would realign itself."

He scoffed.

"You knew nothing."

With a sigh that vanished into the air as fast as his temper, Undon Mathrim looked out of his window. The rays of the Sun tore through his translucent body - he was a ghost of the past, the enforcer of a wronged memory. 

That was when the pain began. 

No blade had touched his chest, already riddled with holes - no knife had carved a name - the pain was searing, gone and aflame anew, as if some page from a book was being torn and restored again and again. It burnt his chest, and he gasped. He felt the shift - invisible streams of fate breaking line, somewhere in the world. He did not need to turn - he already knew the grey mists were already forming behind him; he could feel the Contract calling him.

And of course the Court would commence. 

And of course they would summon him.

He looked one last time at the figure of the Protector of Eteagina, and sighed again, with eyes brighter than the moon now sunken.

"Damn you, Gevatar," said he, and, with a sigh that echoed across the obsidian shadows of Zruddushnakh, the Tyrant of the Ages jumped outside his window, into the mists' gray embrace, and let himself be swallowed.